Continued from last thread -

Also I managed to get my FF IV Historia crystals to level 50 and broke its cap and holy crap its cast effect is strong. Seems much better than the magicites I currently have. Am I missing something here? Do all those boon buffs make a much bigger difference (I mean the historia crystal has a bunch too but they are lower values it seems).
Magicites can have an overall bigger impact in their fields (you can get way more specific-element defense/boost than you do from the Crystal, more Attack, etc) and can be more narrowly tuned to meet the needs of a specific fight - if you need more damage, more survivability, need to be able to Astra-blink a specific triggered status attack but don't have a native Soul Break that can do that, etc, then you can cover that with correct Magicite selection in a way you can't do with the general buffs on the Crystals. They also do not require you to use characters from a specific Realm to get the most benefit, and there is a broader variety of effects you can get from the Magicites when summoning them - all of the Crystals are always going to do the same thing. Magicites are also going to be easier to level, because their curves are tuned to needing to build multiple of them versus a single Realm Crystal (magicite Arcana can also be farmed from beating up magicites, while the Rat Tails for Historia Crystals only really come from one-off rewards on the Cardia dungeons and then the weekly Cardia missions.)

So.. Crystal is good for a focused team where all or most of your characters share the same Realm, or as an easy option if you don't want to bother with figuring out what the best Magicite arrangement for the content is. If the Crystal doesn't pull it off, then you may be able to handle it with a Magicite deck selected to better cover for whatever you need in that particular dungeon, but you're probably going to need to reselect and rearrange your magicites for each one - you won't have an all-situations Magicite deck covering as broad a range of buffs as the Crystals do. (..well, you probably could, just go with a lot of stat-boons, but I think it needs higher grade Magicites than you can farm right now, and would need you to have a lot of them raised so you could inherit them into other ones so they can have the full selection of passives.)